The enigmas of God's creation, and of how He Himself came into being, almighty and powerful, have been pondered in every heart that yearns to know about God. No scripture has fully elucidates these seemingly unanswerable questions. But If you contemplate and try to feel the entire perception of the subject as I shall describe it, you will find the answers to these questions—answers that I received from the very depths of my soul and from God.

The Infinite, God, is the ultimate cause of all finite creation. He projects the power of maya, the storm of delusive relativity—the illusion that the One has become the many—which, blowing over the ocean of His Being and His vibratory wish to create, stirs into manifestation the waves of finite creation. "Unborn though I am,of changeless Essence! yet becoming Lord of all creation, abiding in My own Cosmic Nature (Prakriti), I embody Myself by Self-evolved maya-delusion."1

Manifesting Himself as the creative Cosmic Intelligent Vibration, and using the help of the storm of delusive relativity, God forms out of Himself all finite vibratory waves of mind, energy, and matter: electrons, protons, atoms, molecules, cells, and blocks of solid matter—clusters of island universes floating in the sphere of space, surrounded by wandering radiations.

Thus Intelligent Cosmic Vibration is the first manifested cause of all created things, though the different finite forms of matter are created or caused secondarily by arrangement and combinations of certain basic forms: cells derive from molecules, molecules from atoms, atoms from electrons and protons, electrons and protons from lifetrons, and lifetrons from thoughtrons2 of the Infinite.

Creation exists, and is caused by God; therefore God exists. We can say that intelligent creation exists because of an intelligent God. But who created God, out of whom all things else have come? The Infinite Himself. †The law of causation applies only to finite objects; it does not apply to the Infinite. As all waves on the ocean become dissolved in the ocean, so all finite objects manifesting from the aforesaid finite causes lose themselves in their Eternal Source. Similarly, the law of causation operates outwardly in creation, but is lost in the Infinite.

Through the law of causation, our original parents—the finite creations known as Adam and Eve, who themselves were special creations of the Infinite—helped to create all humanity. Because we are created by our parents—and our parents by our grandparents, and all mankind has come from Adam and Eve—we ask who created God. We apply to the Infinite the law of causation that created us. This is erroneous reasoning.

Varying Perspectives

When you are dancing with the waves of the ocean, you can't get a perspective of the ocean as a whole,- but from the air you have a bird's-eye view of its vast expanse. Similarly, when you concentrate on creation and are immersed in it, you cannot see anything but creation and the law of causation working therein. But when with closed eyes you learn how to look within, you see neither finite forms nor the law that created them, but glimpse the formless, causeless Infinite. In the wintry land near the North Pole, an Eskimo who was hunting seal looked up and saw a Hindu traveller approaching him.

"Where did you come from, my friend?" he asked.

"My home is India," the stranger replied.

"Well, well!" said the Eskimo. "Do Hindus find plenty of good seal meat in India?"

"Oh, no, we don't have any at all," replied the amused visitor.

"Hindus live mostly on vegetables."

"What a foolish statement," thought the Eskimo. "No one can live without seal meat!"

Just as the Eskimo, knowing no other diet, thought all people ate seal meat, so finite creatures, being themselves created by the law of causation, naturally think that the Infinite God also came into being through the law of causation.

Spirit Is Free from Causation

So it is foolish error for finite, causation-born human beings even to question, "Who made God?" The Infinite made the law of causation that created all finite things, though the Infinite Itself exists without having been caused. As an absolute monarch may make all the laws in his kingdom without being bound by them, so the King of the Universe makes all the laws in His kingdom, including the law of causation that governs His finite creation,- but He is not subject to His laws. "I, the Unmanifested, pervade the whole universe. All creatures abide in Me, but I do not abide in them."3 Though present in all things, God is in no way bound by finitude. Therefore the Infinite is. We deduce His existence and omnipotence from his powerful manifestations in creation. His power is fully active in the manifested state. And during cosmic dissolution, all power, cosmic intelligence, and the law of causation become inactive and dissolve into the Absolute, there to await the next cycle of God's creative manifestation. The forces of the storm that create waves in the ocean are manifest in the waves. But no power is manifested when the ocean is still. Similarly, in the creative state, the Infinite manifests intelligence, mind, vibration, forces, and matter. And in the unmanifested state, the Infinite exists solely as Spirit, in which all forces lie dissolved. Out of space come light, nebulae, and weather, and into space they dissolve and hide again. That sphere beyond manifestation is the hiding place of Spirit. The Infinite, beyond the categories of vibratory intelligence, energy, space, and time, is thus a thing in Itself. It can be felt and known as the eternal power that exists without a beginning or end. Creation is caused by God, but God simply is. No one, nothing made God—He has been and will be what He is forever and forever. "O Arjuna! there is nothing higher than Me, or beyond Me. All things (creatures and objects) are bound to Me like a row of gems on a thread."4 This cannot be understood so long as you consider yourself a created being, subject to laws of cause and effect. But as soon as you become one with God in ecstasy, you will know exactly how and what God is—Beginningless, Endless, Causeless. Then, being one with Him, you will know that you too are the Causeless Eternal. As a mortal man you are a creation made by God; as an immortal man of realization, you will know yourself as a wave in the ocean of God, the one and only, self-sustaining, ever-existing Cosmic Consciousness.

1 Bhagavad Gita IV:6.

2 The name given by Paramahansa Yogananda to the first and most subtle manifestation of the creative vibration emanating from Spirit; the primal ideas behind all matter. Thoughtrons compose the ideational or causal universe, from which emanates the astral universe of lifetroms, intelligent life energy; from which in turn emanates the physical universe of gross atomic energy. (See causal world in glossary) (Publisher's Note)

† "Not-Being was not, Being was not then....The One breathed windless, of its own power.Beyond this there was naught whatsoever....The root of Being in Not-Being was foundBy sages tracing it with understanding in their hearts."

— Rig Veda X:129

3 Bhagavad Gita IX:4.

4 Bhagavan Giga VII:7.

Extract from the book "MAN`S ETERNAL QUEST" by Paramahansa Yogananda, pag.360-363.